TAMMANY HALL (and his grandson's writup about Nast's full, ungoing attack on Boss Tweed)

Wrapup upon Tweed. rs. Tammany Hall!

In 1870 Nast launched an attack on New York’s corrupt Tweed Ring. While his campaign against Boss Tweed is familiar to students of American history, it is less well known that in 1871 my grandfather refused a bribe of a half million dollars to call off his attacks and go abroad to study art (equivalent in purchasing power to about $15,395,539.22 today!). Tweed did not so much mind what the papers printed about him, he said, because most of his constituents couldn’t read but they could see “them damn pictures.”

Failing in its attempt to bribe Nast, the Tweed Ring next threatened the publisher of Harper’s by throwing all of the company’s textbooks out of the city schools and ordering the Tweed-controlled board of education to reject all future Harper & Brothers bids for school books. Harper’s board of directors almost capitulated, but Nast’s loyal friend Fletcher Harper stood by him and the fight went on. Nast continued his campaign against the Ring despite threats against his life, vowing that he would see them all in jail before he stopped. When suspicious-looking characters were observed loitering about his home in upper Manhattan and the friendly police captain in the neighborhood was suddenly transferred to another precinct, Nast decided that it was time to move his family out of the city. It was at this time that he bought Villa Fontana in suburban Morristown, New Jersey, which was to be my grandparents’ home for the next thirty years.

Thomas Nast’s cartoon The Tammany Tiger Loose, which appeared as a double-page spread in Harper’s just before the fall elections in 1871, is considered one of the most powerful cartoons of all time and was principally responsible for the defeat of the Tweed Ring at the polls a few days later. It was printed from a wood engraving, and all of Tweed’s gang are clearly identifiable.

(Image and description from <https://www.masshist.org/database/5901>)

After being prosecuted for having looted the city of over thirty million dollars in the course of thirty months, members of the Ring were jailed, but Tweed himself managed to escape to Europe. There he was captured and returned to the United States. Ironically Tweed was apprehended in Spain on a charge of kidnapping, though this was one crime of which he had never been guilty. Authorities in this country, at a loss to understand the charge, later learned that Tweed had been recognized from a Nast cartoon that showed Tweed in prison garb with two little ragamuffins in tow. This was a cartoon that my grandfather had drawn some years earlier to illustrate Tweed’s expressed willingness, when seeking the governorship of New York State, to bring all manner of minor thieves to justice.

Looks like Nast used the excuse of even illustrating “Inflation” to take a dig at Tammany!

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